xTuple ERP 5.0 full release is in beta-testing and expected to be released this year. In addition to many “tweaks” to the system, Major Changes fall into two broad categories — Tax changes and CRM changes.

Sales Tax changes: The tax landscape for buying and selling goods has changed dramatically in the last few years. The kinds of items that are taxed, the nature of particular sales, the number of jurisdictions, and the explosion and influence of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) traffic on the Internet have all grown to the point where no one person can understand it all. An entire sub-industry has sprouted into being just to handle this complex web of compliance issues.

A key player in this market is Avalara with its automated sales and use tax compliance product called AvaTax. There is an integration between xTuple ERP and Avalara’s AvaTax service. If you choose to work with Avalara, add your subscriber information to the xTuple ERP setup, map your existing xTuple tax types to Avalara’s tax codes (the two companies use “tax codes” differently), and you’re ready to go. Compliance headaches? Gone!

CRM Changes:

Great improvements have been made to xTuple ERP’s CRM functionality; it’s all about flexibility to meet the business needs of today and tomorrow.

The concept of “groups” in CRM has been generalized. xTuple formerly had employee groups and customer groups. xTuple Version 5.0 extends that to allow creating groups of addresses, contacts, CRM accounts, and more. The internal structure to do this allows us — or you — to apply the same structure to other objects, paving the way for future expansion.
The associations between disparate CRM objects has been generalized, too. For example, contacts can be attached to multiple CRM accounts. A contact can have as many phone numbers as s/he needs, and you can create the field labels for what type of phone number, etc.
The CRM account merge feature is more capable than ever, allowing two accounts for the same customer to be combined and preserving the history. The old restrictions on what kinds of account can be merged are gone.
Filters on list windows can now remember the columns, not just the rows. Different list filters serve different purposes, so we’ve updated the application to acknowledge that. Earlier releases of xTuple ERP remember the visible columns on a window and show those same columns next time you open that same window. Version 5.0 gives you the option of associating the visible columns with specific filters. That way, your marketing filters of contacts can show a different set of columns than your customer service filters. This simplifies data exports for specific purposes, too.